1. Field
Embodiments of this invention relate to recognizing persons in visual content.
2. Background Art
The Internet hosts vast amounts of content of different types including text, images, and video. Leveraging this content requires the content to be searchable and organized. Images are generally searched and organized based on identifiers that are manually assigned by users.
In particular, when an image is that of a person's face, the recognition of that face by a person can be done with extremely high accuracy despite large variations in appearance, lighting, and expressions. Computer vision systems, on the other hand, have had a difficult time in performing recognition at the level of accuracy of a human being. Although face recognition has been a long standing problem in computer vision and other domains, the main focus of the industry has been the recognition of faces in controlled environments with fairly small datasets. As the datasets increase into the thousands, each with appearance variations due to illumination, pose, and expression, the task of successful verification and recognition has been lacking.
As small datasets of famous people have become available, an effort to recognize celebrities in the news has also occurred. Algorithms for face identification, verification, and recognition have been developed that typically contain datasets constrained to news pictures that are usually of high quality, taken in controlled environments, and in controlled poses. In contrast, generic images of people of interest in uncontrolled environments lack the ability to be automatically recognized and verified.
Therefore, what are needed are methods and systems to automatically mine person models of celebrities for visual search applications.